Browsing: Features

spent a lot of today thinking about the unpredictability of life and why things happen the way  they do. The helicopter crash, the meaningless deaths of all on board including the basketball legend  Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old prodigy daughter Gianna.  The random nature of life is the enigma we have to face time and again.

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Leila Chirayath Janah, 29, recently bagged a whopping $ 1. 25 million in funding from Google for her company, Samasource. Add that in, and this small, non-profit has got close to $ 5 million from several major giant corporations including Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Ebay, Cisco, Facebook, LinkedIn and even the US State Department.

Why have so many blue chip organizations put their faith in this little-known non-profit?

The idea behind Samasource is audacious – that the poorest of the poor are equal to the larger world community and quite capable of doing good work when they are entrusted with it, rather than just being given handouts and pity. In fact, Sama means equal in Sanskrit and it is Leila’s way of bringing the poor into the hi-tech world.

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It started like a whispering rustle around the world, a soft rumbling and become this mighty force of marchers from Paris to Washington DC which also poked its way into my quiet apartment in New York. It seemed almost sacrilegious to be just spending a cerebral work afternoon at my computer when right on my streets so much action was taking place.

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Dr. Nirmal Mattoo may be far away from the Vale of Kashmir, the place where he was born,  but its sheer beauty, sense of community and native customs have stayed with him, even in far-off New York. He has tried to bring the wisdom and beauty of India, including that of his hometown, to share with the larger world.

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Some stories have so much power – and there’s such a need for them! I had done this in-depth story on adoption four years ago & I’m amazed readers who are looking to adopt come to it even today for information. So I thought I’d share it again and would love your input and personal experiences with the process of adopting children from India. I do intend to revisit this topic in the coming months and would love your insights.

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New York is a place of new beginnings and something innovative is always happening in the Big City. The digital age may have sounded the death-knell of the printed word but we are in Manhattan, celebrating new books in a new country. Indian writers and books, long unsung in the mainstream, are getting their moment in the limelight with the Wonderland@IAAC Literary festival which is the fifth literary festival organized by the Indo-American Arts Council.

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The passing of Shashi Kapoor has robbed the world of one of the most delightful smiles in the world, one of the most loved faces in the Hindi film industry. There may have been more dashing heroes, more powerful muscle-bound anti-heroes, more adept dancers but for his teenage fans he will always be the ‘Ingle Mingle Heartthrob’ a moniker given to him because of his toothy smile which only added to his adorable persona.

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As a journalist, I’ve always been intrigued by the unique experiences, sights and sounds of individual lives, a billion stories waiting to be told. Immigrants who’ve traveled to a new country always have their idiosyncratic cache of memories, of a past which belongs only to themselves.

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f you can’t go to the Jaipur Literature Festival, the festival comes to you with its traveling caravan of writers and poets and raconteurs. It is good news for the many disaporic communities that this wandering festival now comes to New York, Boulder, Colorado and its latest stop is Toronto, Canada.

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